Union Members Support Reform shock

Tissues available at Union HQ's

A poll showing Reform ahead of Labour among trade unionists is being treated as a bombshell. It should have been obvious to anyone paying attention. Anyone, that is, except the union leadership.

There is a particular genre of political moment that deserves its own name: the discovery, by those who should have known years ago, of something that everybody else has known for years. The latest specimen has arrived courtesy of JL Partners, whose polling for The Times has the breathtaking audacity to reveal that Reform UK is now ahead of Labour among trade union members. Among public sector union members. The people whose subscriptions fund the very organisations that have been issuing increasingly frantic press releases about how Reform is an “unprecedented threat to the union movement.”

The unions, apparently, were not consulted.

Let us be precise about what this poll shows, and what it does not. These are public sector unions: Unison with its 1.4 million members, the GMB, the National Education Union, the PCS. These are not the natural hunting ground of the disgruntled manufacturing worker in a post-industrial town, the constituency that political commentators have been pointing at for the past decade while explaining why Reform’s support was perfectly understandable but somehow not quite real. These are nurses. Local government workers. Teachers. Civil servants. The very categories of worker whose job security, pay, and conditions are most directly affected by government decisions. And they have, in substantial numbers, decided that they would rather vote for Nigel Farage than Keir Starmer.

One imagines the scene in certain union headquarters. The denial. The rationalisation. The reaching for the phrase “false consciousness.”

Here is the thing, though: this is not a bombshell. It is just the first piece of hard published data confirming what has been visible to anyone in the room for some time. There is a strong suspicion, well-founded in the way these things tend to be, that Unison and the GMB conducted their own internal polling some time ago and arrived at roughly similar conclusions. The evidence is circumstantial but compelling: Robert Peston reported last year that senior union figures had gone to Starmer at the Labour conference in Liverpool and, in terms that required no diplomatic training to decode, told him that their members were leaving Labour. Not drifting. Not softening. Leaving, and leaving to Reform. That is not the kind of warning you deliver without data in your pocket.

Starmer, characteristically, appears to have filed it under “known problem, no available solution“ and moved on.

The obvious rejoinder is that this is, of course, only the public sector. True enough. But the logic runs in exactly the wrong direction for those who find comfort in that qualifier. Public sector union members are, all other things being equal, more institutionally attached to the Labour Party than their private sector counterparts. They work for the state. They depend on public spending. Their entire professional existence is bound up with the argument that government is a force for good and should be well-funded and expansive. If Reform is ahead among them, the numbers among Unite members in manufacturing, or the Communication Workers Union in what remains of telecoms, or USDAW in retail, will be considerably worse. The public sector is the floor, not the ceiling.

Danny Kruger understood this before most. His public conversations with the leadership of the PCS and the National Education Union, in which he made perfectly plain to them that a Reform government would not be conducting its relationships with the civil service unions on the terms to which they had become accustomed. A Reform Government will not be bullied, and will apply the law. As we can now see he was directing his comments to people whose members, in significant numbers, might well vote for him. The officers sit there with their lanyards and their institutional memories and their absolute confidence that the working class would do as it was directed. The members, meanwhile, were doing something else entirely.

This is the structural problem that no amount of emergency press releases will solve. The union movement in Britain has, over the course of a generation, undergone a quiet transformation that its leadership has been careful not to notice. The headquarters of the major unions are populated, to a remarkable degree, by people who have spent their entire careers in the union movement. Many went straight from university to a union research department or political officer role and have not left. They are committed, intelligent, and hardworking. They are also, by inclination, temperament, and life experience, entirely disconnected from the people they purport to represent.

The interests of the officers and the interests of the members are not, it turns out, the same interests. The officers want a Labour government because Labour is comfortable with public sector unions, amenable to negotiation, and unlikely to threaten the institutional infrastructure on which their careers depend. The members want someone to do something about the cost of living, about immigration, about the feeling that the country is being managed for the benefit of people who are not them. These are not the same thing. They have not been the same thing for a while. Somebody should perhaps have mentioned it.

The union movement’s response to the polling has been entirely predictable. Unison has declared that Reform “poses an unprecedented threat to the union movement“ and that it “couldn’t be more urgent for Labour to stop playing on Farage’s pitch.“ The National Education Union has issued a statement. The TUC general secretary Paul Nowak had already warned, back at the turn of the year, that members were turning to Farage over the cost of living. The warnings multiply. The polling deteriorates. The relationship between cause and effect remains, apparently, a mystery.

One is tempted to suggest that if the union leadership actually wanted to know what its members thought, it might try asking them. Not in a consultative document circulated to branch officials. Not through the approved channels. Actually asking. The answer, it transpires, is available from JL Partners, price on application, and it is not especially comfortable reading.

The country has turned away from Labour. The working class has turned away fastest. This is not a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, which is, one concedes, a smaller group than one would hope.

There is a proposal that deserves to be made, quietly and without ceremony: independent unions, organised around the interests of members rather than the career interests of officers, unions that would represent what their members actually think rather than what a regional organiser who has not done a non-union job since 2003 imagines they ought to think. The lanyard class would find this suggestion offensive. The polling suggests the members might find it rather attractive.

A union movement that is ahead of its members on the great political questions of the day is not a union movement. It is a lobby group with better brand recognition. And lobbying, as the polling rather firmly demonstrates, is not the same as representing.